Jon Stewart as programming genius?

Ross Douthat has an editorial in The New York Times about CNN:

Listening to Jon Stewart helped destroy CNN. Now imitating him might be the network’s only hope of salvation.
It was October of 2004, the heat of the presidential campaign, when Stewart showed up on Crossfire, long CNN’s flagship political program, and delivered a now-legendary tirade: “Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America,” he told the hosts, Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson. He called them “political hacks”. He accused them of “helping the politicians and the corporations”. He compared their show to a professional wrestling match. “You’re doing theater,” he said, “when you should be doing debate.”
At it turned out, CNN was paying attention. Within two months, Crossfire was canceled, and the network’s president, Jon Klein, cited Stewart’s tirade as a tipping point. “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise,” Klein said. Henceforward, he announced, CNN would move away from “head-butting debate shows.” Let FOX and MSNBC have their “live guests” and “spirited debate.” CNN was going to report, not editorialize.
Big mistake.
Six years later, CNN is still the network Americans turn to when an earthquake strikes Haiti or a crucial health care vote takes place. But most days are slow news days, opinionated journalism is more interesting than the elusive quest for perfect objectivity, and CNN is getting absolutely murdered in the ratings.
It was bad before this year; now it’s terrible. CNN’s prime-time hosts have lost almost half their viewers in the last twelve months. In February, the once-proud network slipped behind not only Fox News and MSNBC, but Headline News (its sister network) and CNBC as well. Anderson Cooper sometimes gets beaten by re-runs of Keith Olbermann’s Countdown.
People at CNN see themselves as victims of a polarized political culture and, to some extent, they are. But high-minded self-pity only gets you so far. At a media event in Washington recently, I watched a CNN producer try to persuade a gaggle of skeptical right-wing journalists that the network’s hosts really are objective. (“You’d be surprised how some of them vote!”) Even if they were, it wouldn’t matter. The disinterested anchorman pose worked when television news ran for thirty minutes every night at 6 p.m. It doesn’t work across hours and hours of prime time, with Campbell Brown blurring into John King blurring into Wolf Blitzzzzzz....
What might work, instead, is a cable news network devoted to actual debate. For all the red-faced shouting, debate isn’t really what you get on Fox and MSNBC. Hannity has ditched Colmes, and conservatives are only invited on Rachel Maddow’s show when they have something nasty to say about Republicans. There’s room, it would seem, for a network where representatives from the right and left can both feel comfortable, and compete on roughly equal terms. Sort of like they did on Crossfire.
But not the Crossfire of 2004. CNN overreacted to Jon Stewart’s jeremiad, but he wasn’t entirely wrong. The show was years removed from its Michael Kinsley/Pat Buchanan glory days, and its liberal hosts at the time, Begala and Carville, really were Democratic Party hacks. (The conservatives, Carlson and Robert Novak, were much more independent-minded, but the constant need to rebut partisan talking points took its toll on them as well.)
What cable news needs, instead, is something more like what Stewart himself has been doing on The Daily Show. Instead of bringing in the strategists, consultants, and professional outrage artists who predominate on other networks, he ushers conservative commentators into his studio for conversations that are lengthy, respectful, and often riveting. Stewart’s series of debates on torture and interrogation policy, in particular— featuring John Yoo and Marc Thiessen, among others— have been more substantive than anything on Fox or MSNBC.
Even the thrust-and-parry sessions of The Daily Show, though, are limited by the left-right binary that divides and dulls our politics. They’re better than the competition, but they don’t give free rein to eccentricity and unpredictability, or generate arguments that finish somewhere wildly different than where you’d expect them to end up. This is what you find in the riveting television debates of the past: William F. Buckley versus Gore Vidal, Vidal versus Norman Mailer, anything involving Ross Perot. And it’s what you get from the mad, compulsively watchable Glenn Beck, who’s an extremist without being a knee-jerk partisan: you know he’s way out there on the right somewhere, but you don’t know what he’s going to say next.
Stewart, Buckley, Beck... none of these are exactly the models that you’d expect “the most trusted name in news” to look to for inspiration. And some CNN suits have probably never even heard of Gore Vidal. But television is a business. And when you’re losing to re-runs, you’ve got nothing to lose.

Not a job for Rico

Peter Foster has the story in the Telegraph:

Rescue workers have pulled 114 men from the mine in China's northern Shanxi province, sparking cheers from the 3,000 men who had worked round-the-clock shifts for more than a week to reach their stranded colleagues, according to China's state news broadcaster. Relatives and bystanders, many shedding tears of relief, burst into spontaneous applause as the first men were brought up from the flooded shaft where they had survived 820 feet below ground by using belts to hold themselves up in the rising waters. A total of 153 miners were reported to be trapped in the Wangjialing mine, which was still under construction on 28 March when workers breached an adjacent old mine working, causing the pit to flood with a torrent of icy black water.
"A miracle has finally happened," said Liu Dezheng, a spokesman for the rescuers, after the first nine miners were brought to the surface shortly after midnight on Sunday.
"This is probably one of the most amazing rescues in the history of mining anywhere," said David Feickert, a coal mine safety adviser to the Chinese government. "The miners in the lowest levels will be in the most extreme danger," he added, "Just think of a tall building, with people on different floors, if that suddenly filled up with water." The dramatic scenes were relayed to the public by China's state-run broadcaster CCTV and continued throughout Monday, which was "tomb-sweeping day", a national holiday in China to honour the dead.
The rescued men were shown being stretchered from the scene covered in thick green blankets, with towels placed across their blackened faces to shield their eyes from the sunlight after spending so many days in pitch darkness. One of the workers still was holding his mining lamp. All were reported to be in a "stable condition", although weakened by dehydration and hypothermia and suffering from skin ulceration caused by their long immersion in filthy water.
"Their blood pressure and heart rates remained normal after having being trapped in the shaft for one week," Xinhua reported of the survivors.
A convoy of ambulances snaked backwards from the colliery gates waiting to receive more survivors, with relatives and bystanders lining the road bursting into applause as each ambulance containing a new survivor sped off to waiting hospitals.
Families of the survivors were overjoyed. "He called and managed to say my sister's nickname, 'Xiaomi,' so we know it's really him and that he's alive," said Long Liming, who said he received a call around midday from his rescued brother-in-law Fu Ziyang.
Liu Qiang, chief medical officer at the Linfen hospital in Shanxi province, confirmed the miners were in a stable condition, but added that some were still in shock. CCTV said that some of the miners had hung from their belts for three days before managing to clamber into a mining cart that had floated by.
Hopes for rescuing the men had all but faded by the end of last week as rescuers battled to pump millions of gallons of water out of the flooded pit. However, they were dramatically revived on Friday after a dredging probe was returned to the surface with a piece of mining equipment attached to it in a way that could have only been done by a human hand.
Within hours, rescuers banging on a section of pipe had made contact with the trapped men, who responded by tapping back, sparking scenes of jubilation from those above ground.
Before Monday's rescue, the accident at Wangjialing would have been China's worst since August of 2007, when 172 workers died in a mine flood in the eastern province of Shandong. Despite substantial improvements in mine safety over the last five years, an average of seven miners still die in China every day, most digging coal which satisfies some seventy per cent of the country's voracious appetite for electricity.

More piracy

The Somalis are at it again, and the BBC has the story:

A South Korea-operated, Singapore-owned oil tanker has been hijacked by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. The 300,000-tonne Samho Dream, loaded with crude oil, was on its way from Iraq to the United States with 24 crew when it was seized on Sunday. Pirates targeting ships off the coast of Somalia made tens of millions of dollars in ransom payments last year.
South Korea has sent a destroyer already in the area to intercept the tanker before it reaches any port. The Cheong-hae destroyer was on patrol in the Gulf of Aden, where pirates have often staged attacks. It has been diverted some 1,500 km (930 miles) to the south-east to the area where the hijacking took place. In recent months, pirates have been attacking ships further out to sea, in some cases closer to the Indian coast than Somalia.
"The government has dispatched our Cheong-hae naval unit to the waters of the Indian Ocean, where the ship hijacked by Somali pirates is assumed to be," the South Korean foreign ministry said in a statement. "The ship is presumed to have been hijacked by Somali pirates," the ministry said. It also expressed concern for the safety of the crew: five South Koreans and 19 Filipinos.
The BBC's Korea correspondent, John Sudworth, says local media are reporting that the destroyer, which is part of the naval unit, can travel faster than the super tanker and would be able to reach the ship before it could reach any port. But any attempt to recapture the ship would be extremely dangerous, our correspondent says. Given that smoking on the decks of oil tankers is not allowed, a gun battle is inconceivable, he adds.
The value of the Samho Dream's cargo is estimated at about $170m (£111.7m). Reuters reported that the US refiner Valero Energy Corp said it was the owner of the crude oil cargo. It said a pirate source named Mohamed had said the ship was now heading for Haradheere, the pirates' base at which many ships are held during ransom negotiations.
South Korea is one of several Asian nations that have an anti-piracy warship patrolling Somali waters to guard against hijackings. Western navies are also trying to protect ships against pirate attack. At least four South Korean ships have been hijacked by Somali pirates in recent years: a tuna ship with 25 crew in 2006, two ships and 24 crew (held captive for six months) in 2007, and a cargo ship with 22 sailors in September 2008. The crew in that last attack were released after the ship's owner paid a ransom.
The first successful hijacking of what is called a Very Large Crude Carrier was of the Saudi-owned Sirius Star in late 2008. Another VLCC, the Maran Centaurus, was taken last November and held for two months before a ransom estimated at between $5.5m and $7m was paid.

Why haven't these guys ever heard of a convoy? But Rico says you can always go here and buy his book on piracy, too...

Not even earthquake-related

The BBC has an article about a prison escape in Northern Mexico, but on the other side of the country from the earthquake:

Thirteen inmates escaped when armed men arrived in ten vehicles and stormed a prison in the border city of Reynosa, Mexican officials said. Three prisoners died during the raid but it was unclear who shot them.
Authorities have put 31 prison staff under investigation in connection with the escape. It was the second big jailbreak in a week in Tamaulipas state, which has seen an increase in violence blamed on a split between rival drug gangs.
The jailbreak in Reynosa, which lies just across the border from McAllen, Texas, happened on Friday night. The authorities reported the raid and the deaths of the three prisoners but did not give details of the escape until Sunday.
On 26 March, forty prisoners escaped from a jail in Matamoros, also in Tamaulipas. Escapes are common from Mexican state prisons, with guards either being paid to assist or intimidated into not resisting. Violence has been on the increase in Tamaulipas and in the neighbouring state of Nuevo Leon. Officials say the powerful drug-trafficking gang known as the Gulf Cartel has split with its former allies, Los Zetas, and the two are now battling for control of drug routes into the US.

Rico says any time we can get the weasels fighting amongst themselves, all the better...

Not funny, but it is

The Los Angeles Times has an article by Julia Damianova about the 'personal shopper' for the Kims when they ran North Korea (which is funny right there; but, wait, there's more):

Kim Jong Ryul is a slightly built and lively 75-year-old with large glasses and a gray suit that seems several sizes too big. But Kim wears it anyway. It is virtually his only connection to his past. "This is the suit I had on," the North Korean native explains, "when I escaped."
About 15 years ago, Kim says, he exchanged his upper-echelon North Korean government job for a lonely underground existence in Austria, where he remains in constant fear of assassination.
Kim is one of thousands who, in recent years, have run from the North Korean government's grip. But his personal history, the subject of a new book, offers a rare taste of a higher-level North Korean's contempt for his country's totalitarian rulers, an anger that gave him the will to turn his back on his life and his loved ones.
For twenty years, the mechanical engineer and onetime army colonel who went to college in the former East Germany purchased industrial goods, luxury Mercedes-Benz cars, and weapons for the North Korean leadership.
His shopping list also included such sensitive items as mass spectrometers that can be used, among other purposes, in identifying uranium and plutonium particles. Kim spoke fluent German, English, and Japanese, having learned the latter, he says, from watching television. Young, intelligent, and well educated, he was the perfect person to send on lavish shopping sprees to Europe. Vienna was the ideal hub for business dealings in Germany, Switzerland, and France, he says.
Through intermediary companies, he even bought goods from the United States, including the spectrometers, which are on the Nuclear Suppliers Group's list of restricted, dual-use equipment, and pistols that North Korean leaders ardently collected. "They all knew this was for North Korea," he says, speaking of the middlemen he worked with. But his offers were difficult to resist, he says, because he paid in cash, 30% over the usual asking price.
At the same time, he says, he was secretly making a Western-style profit for himself. Without the knowledge of his comrades, he generally kept about 3% of the money from each deal, setting up a secret account in the Austrian private bank Schoellerbank, where he eventually amassed about $300,000. In October 1994, Kim says, he fled to Austria, faking his death and going into hiding. "I lived for fifteen years like a mole."
Finally, he had had enough and decided to tell his story to two Austrian journalists. The book spotlights his escape and his descriptions of the decadence and arrogance of North Korea's leaders, who spared no expense to obtain whatever they craved while their own people were starving to death.
"After I turned 70 years old, I thought, I may die soon, and that is why I wanted to do this book," Kim says during an interview in the office of his publisher in Vienna. Kim says he sees no hope for political change in his homeland or of ever again seeing his wife, now 70, his 45-year-old son, and his 39-year-old daughter. "I abandoned my family 17 years ago."
The public stance that Kim is now taking differs from that of many North Korean defectors, who use pseudonyms or demand anonymity when they speak about their homeland or their life afterward. In his years of freedom in Austria, Kim says, he has lived a lonely existence in a small village outside Vienna. He has maintained a low profile, paid all bills on time and otherwise steered clear of trouble so as not to attract attention. "I have no friends," he says. "My principle was not to make many friends because I could start talking, then I might tell them something about myself and this would not be good."
First he insists that his neighbors know his true story, but later says that they don't. "Nobody asks. They only greet and want to know what I will cook today," Kim says, laughing. "This book will be the death of me," he says, but it seems that this thought doesn't scare him much. Kim is fully aware that by speaking up he has also endangered his family in North Korea, with whom he has had no contact since he left Pyongyang in 1993. "They will not kill my family, but will kick them out of the capital." He says he is sorry for this but his need to tell his story to the world is more important. "With this book I wanted to shout out loud for a last time, and then die. I want to expose these two Kims, the two dictators [the late Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il], to criticize them and to say that they are terrible people and their policy is filthy," Kim says. And still, the tiny but tough man does not sound as though he is going to give up on life just yet. "Tomorrow, or after tomorrow, I will go into hiding again." He smiles and assures a listener that he can easily disappear because he knows Austria so well. Or maybe he will go abroad. First, however, he will have to see the Austrian police about all the illegal dealings he was involved in during his two decades in the service of the North Korean government. His next appointment is to officially apply for asylum because Kim Jong Ryul is no incognito refugee in Austria anymore.

Guess it's not the Happiest Place on Earth after all

Rico says that, of course, they are French, after all, but Matthew Campbell has the story in The Times:

Staff at Disneyland Paris, the most popular tourist attraction in Europe, are considering industrial action to improve their working conditions after the suicides of three employees since the start of the year.
Guy-Bruno Mboe, leader of a Disneyland union, has blamed the latest two deaths on “brutal” working conditions. “It’s all about profit, profit, profit,” said Mboe. “The combination of fewer staff and demands for more productivity just pushed this poor man over the edge.”
The directors of the resort denied that the suicide of an employee in his home on 26 March had anything to do with his working conditions. They complained of a union attempt to exploit the tragedy.
The man, identified only as Franck L., a 37-year-old father of four and restaurant manager at Disneyland, hanged himself on the day he was supposed to return to work after holidays and sick leave. According to Mboe, the restaurant manager had told colleagues he wanted to leave his job “because of having to work more and more with less and less means”.
Another Disneyland restaurant worker had thrown himself in front of a train five weeks earlier. At the beginning of February an employee had committed suicide for what the company called “personal reasons”. After being fired, another worker recently threatened to kill himself in the theme park.
The company has said that it will investigate the “possible factors of stress or harassment”.

Sainthood's out, apparently

The Times has an an article by Bojan Pancevski and John Follain about yet another Pope and abused kids:

When John Paul II died five years ago, the crowd that packed St Peter’s Square for his funeral clamoured “Santo subito! (Saint now!)” in a spontaneous tribute to the charisma of the Polish pontiff.
As the faithful marked the anniversary of John Paul’s death on Good Friday, however, he was being drawn into the scandal over child abuse in the Catholic church that has confronted his successor, Benedict XVI, with the worst crisis of his reign.
Allegations that the late pontiff blocked an inquiry into a paedophile cardinal, promoted senior church figures despite accusations that they had molested boys, and covered up innumerable cases of abuse during his 26-year papacy have cast a cloud over his path to sainthood.
The most serious claims related to Cardinal Hans Hermann Groer, an Austrian friend of John Paul’s, who abused an estimated 2,000 boys over decades but never faced any sanction from Rome.
Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Groer’s successor, criticised the handling of that scandal and other abuse cases last week after holding a special service in St Stephen’s cathedral, Vienna, entitled “Admitting our guilt”. Schönborn condemned the “sinful structures” within the church and the patterns of “silencing” victims and “looking away”. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger— who became Pope Benedict— had tried to investigate the abuses as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, according to Schönborn. But his efforts had been blocked by “the Vatican”, an apparent reference to John Paul. Asked by The Sunday Times whether John Paul’s role in the cover-up of abuse should be investigated, Schönborn said: “I have known Pope Benedict personally during 37 years of amiable acquaintance and I can say with certainty that... he made entirely clear efforts not to cover things up but to tackle and investigate them. This was not always met with approval in the Vatican.”
The Groer affair became public in 1995 when former pupils of an elite Catholic school accused him of sexual abuse. After an outcry, Groer was replaced and made the prior of a convent. He was never punished and issued only a vague apology in 1998 before retreating to a nunnery where he lived until his death in 2003. Some of his victims were offered “hush money” from the church.
Michael Tfirst, 54, one of Groer’s victims, claims to have reported the abuse to highranking church officials from the 1970s onwards. He says the church paid him £3,300 in 2004 under a contract that obliged him to keep quiet. “There is no question that Ratzinger knew all the details of reports on abuse within the church, as there is no doubt that John Paul, his superior, took part in a massive and systematic cover-up,” Tfirst said.
John Paul also faced criticism last week from Poland for protecting Archbishop Juliusz Paetz, who was accused of abusing trainee priests. Letters detailing the charges were sent to John Paul’s office and to Ratzinger in 2000, but were ignored. Paetz resigned in 2002 when the allegations became public.
Stanislaw Obirek, a Polish theologian and a former Jesuit priest, said: “I believe John Paul is the key person responsible for the cover-up of abuse cases, because most of it occurred during his papacy. How can someone who is to blame for this be beatified?”
In America critics pointed out that, although Benedict has borne the brunt of criticism over ignoring the scandal of Father Lawrence Murphy, who was accused of molesting 200 deaf boys at a special school in Wisconsin, Ratzinger had acted on the authority of John Paul.
Another beneficiary of John Paul’s discreet approach was Marcial Maciel Degollado, a Mexican priest known as Father Maciel, who founded a conservative religious order. He was accused by former members of abuse in 1998. John Paul blessed Maciel in the Vatican in late 2004, at a time when Ratzinger was investigating him. A year after Ratzinger became pope, the Vatican ordered Maciel to lead “a reserved life of prayer and penance”, effectively removing him from power.
John Paul was also accused of ignoring controversy over John Magee, a former private secretary to three popes, including the Polish pontiff, who named him Bishop of Cloyne in 1987. Late last month, Magee was forced to resign after an independent report found that his diocese in Ireland had put children at risk.
In the Vatican the spiralling allegations have prompted a siege-like mentality. Father Federico Lombardi, Benedict’s spokesman, declined to comment on John Paul’s handling of abuse cases. “We’re busy with Easter celebrations, let’s focus on the homilies,” he said.
The Polish cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, John Paul’s private secretary for four decades, rejected as “unfair and misleading” any attempt to distinguish between the approaches of the two popes to abuse cases. “Benedict is strongly committed to clearing things up, like a father,” Dziwisz told La Repubblica, the Italian newspaper.
In Europe there are signs of the faithful turning their backs on the church in large numbers. In Austria alone more than 20,000 Catholics left the church in March.
In America there was a furious response by Jewish groups to a Good Friday sermon by Father Raniero Cantalamessa, Benedict’s personal preacher, in which he compared the wave of attacks on the church to anti-Semitism. Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, of the American Jewish Committee, protested: “So far I haven’t seen Saint Peter burn. The Vatican is trying to turn the persecutors into victims.”
John Paul was expected to be beatified in October but the process may be delayed. A French nun who appeared to have been miraculously cured of Parkinson’s disease through his intercession has reportedly been found to be suffering from a different illness.
Giancarlo Zizola, a leading expert on the Vatican, said the church officials who had gathered documents and questioned witnesses about John Paul’s suitability for sainthood had examined “negative” aspects of his papacy, including his handling of abuse cases. “There’s no chance of Benedict delaying the beatification because of the abuse scandal,” Zizola said. “On the contrary, I expect he’ll accelerate it.”
ritics say John Paul II:

Failed to encourage bishops to report accusations of paedophilia by priests to the police.
Ignored accusations against senior members of the clergy, at times promoting them to higher office.
Allowed many priests accused of paedophilia to be transferred to a new diocese without anyone being warned of their record.
Decreed that “pontifical secrecy” must apply to cases of sexual abuse in church trials.

Rico says leave St. Peter out of it; burn the Vatican... But 'retiring to a nunnery'? Can't abuse a bunch of nuns, Rico guesses, but there's some Shakespeare (from Hamlet) for that:

Get thee to a nunn'ry, why woulds't thou be a breeder of sinners?

Spot on, by accident

Much to Rico's surprise...

History for the last century

Courtesy of Rico's friend Kevin Kitterman, this piece of history, circa 1945:

The new get-together

Courtesy of Rico's friend Pat DeCarlo, this tidbit of feminist history:

For those of you who don't live in the South and think we are a bunch of uncivilized ruffians, well, it's simply not true!
In fact, we have ladies' groups that meet regularly to discuss current events and develop needed home-skills. For example, this photo was recently taken at a ladies group meeting in San Antonio, Texas where they were discussing the President and the elections coming up in 2010 and 2012...

Close enough

History for the day

On 5 April 1951, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death for conspiring to commit espionage for the Soviet Union.

Civil War for the day

Rico lugging a ball for the Delaware Blues mortar at a Spring National.

Cowboy story

A young fellow in torn and tattered cowboy garb showed up at Heaven's Pearly Gates and approached St. Peter, requesting admittance.
St. Peter asked him: "What have you done in your short life, young man, to merit admittance into Heaven?"
"Nuthin' much," the cowboy admitted, "except for one thang. I stood up fer law an' order and all that's good an' proper when I come upon a real bad man who were drankin' likker in a saloon. Outlaw name o' Reckless Dan McCoy, he was. A violent an' profane man of an evil nature an' intemperate conduct. A notorious robber o' banks an' stagecoaches, a horse thief, a brigand, an' a wanted man in several states an' territories. I walked right up to him, called him a low, backshootin', no-account dog, and tol' him there was no place in my town fer the likes o' him and that he'd best git outta town right quick, or else face the consequences. Then I throwed a glass o' lukewarm beer in his ugly face."
St. Peter was impressed. "Where and when did all this happen?"
"Tonopah, Nevada." The young fellow shrugged. "About two, maybe three minutes ago."

Not quite the Big One, but getting closer

According to an article in The New York Times by Jennifer Steinhauer and Randal Archibold:

A powerful earthquake just southeast of Tijuana shook southern California on Sunday afternoon, damaging buildings in border towns and rattling a seismically-sophisticated population as far north as Los Angeles and Phoenix. Chandeliers swayed, homes shook and the earth seemed to slide under the feet of people emerging from Easter church services for well over a minute as the quake rocked states in Mexico and the United States.
The 7.2 quake struck just after at 3:30 p.m. local time, and was centered sixteen miles south-southwest of Guadalupe Victoria in Baja California, and about 108 miles east-southeast of Tijuana, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Carlton Hargrave, 64, was standing in the entryway of Family Style Buffet in Calexico, a California border town, when the quake hit. His restaurant, he said in a telephone interview, was "almost completely destroyed. We’ve got tables overturned, plates broken on the floor. The ceilings caved in. It was big, I mean, it was major," he said this in a shaky voice, with the sound of his feet crunching rubble and glass and plate fragments.
Reports from the remote area in Mexico where the quake hit were slow in coming and Mexican websites were overloaded in the two hours following the shaking, but an earthquake of that size would likely cause major property damage and possible injuries to anything or anyone near its epicenter. A reporter in Tijuana for the newspaper Frontera who did not want to give his name said there were no reports of damage or injury there, but reporters were awaiting definitive word from the authorities.
El Imparcial, a newspaper in the state of Sonora, south of Arizona, reported cracks in condominium buildings in Mexicali and burst pipes but the damage did not appear severe.
The shaking was particularly acute in San Diego, where the quake set off several alarms and sent the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department out on several calls, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune’s website.
“We have some reports of scattered property damage,” Ramona Hastings, a sergeant assigned to the watch command at the San Diego Police Department, said in a telephone interview. Among the reports were several burst pipes, including at least one under a house, and damage to a three-story apartment building.
In Los Angeles, homes slid from side to side for well over a minute, a nauseating and seemingly endless wave that could be felt from the beach to the Hollywood Hills. Twitter was quickly filled with reports from the border to Phoenix to Los Angeles. “People were outside crying because the beams looked like they were going to collapse and a wall cracked (along with various things falling) and the power went out in some parts,” read one Tweet from Calexico. In Imperial, California, another border city, Eslibonita tweeted, “It’s still going... My dresser fell on my and half of my fish tank’s water is on my carpet.”
The earthquake occurred about 20.1 miles below the earth’s surface, the geological survey said. Experts have said that such a depth increases the chances that the earth might absorb a majority of the shock, reducing the chances of damage on the surface. A 6.9 earthquake can cause major damage in structures, crack the ground and shift foundations.
At least five possible aftershocks were reported, including a 4.5-magnitude quake 62 miles east of Tijuana, reported at 4:09 p.m., and a 5.1-magnitude quake near Imperial, California at 4:15 p.m. A 3.8-magnitude quake was also reported 12 miles northwest of Jacumba Hot Springs, California at 4:19 p.m. A 3.6-magnitude quake was reported 7 miles northeast of Julian, California at 4:22 p.m.. A 4.3-magnitude quake was reported 15 miles west-southwest of Calixico, California at 4:34 p.m., and a 4.7-magnitude quake was reported fourteen miles south-southwest of Mexicali, Baja California at 4:37 p.m.
Emergency officials urged residents to contact each other using text messages in order to keep cellphone signals clear for emergency workers responding to distress calls.
A viewer told CNN that their boat in San Diego Harbor began rocking from the quake and that pilings began shaking for several seconds.
The quake quickly affected other areas. In Century City, KABC-TV reported that a woman was trapped in an elevator in Century City. And at the LAX Airport, some passengers told CNN that they had felt rumbling and were worried that flights might be delayed.
People in Arizona and Nevada reported feeling the quakes. “My family and I live in Gilbert, Arizona, and we could feel the house shake and our pool was sloshing against its sides,” said Donald Whiting. “I’m not sure how far we are from the epicenter, but it’s no surprise Los Angeles felt this one.”

Rico says his father, who lives near San Diego, hasn't reported in yet, but he hopes to hear from him soon...

Naval history for the day

Courtesy of Rico's father, this little-known bit of naval history:

The USS Constitution (Old Ironsides), as a combat vessel, carried 48,600 gallons of fresh water for her crew of 475 officers and men. This was sufficient to last through six months of sustained operations at sea. She carried no evaporators (i.e., fresh water distillers).
However, let it be noted that, according to her ship's log

On 27 July 1798, the USS Constitution sailed from Boston with a full complement of 475 officers and men; 48,600 gallons of fresh water; 7,400 cannon shot; 11,600 pounds of black powder; and 79,400 gallons of rum.

Her mission: "To destroy and harass English shipping."
Making Jamaica on 6 October, she took on 826 pounds of flour and 68,300 gallons of rum. Then she headed for the Azores, arriving 12 November. There she provisioned with 550 pounds of beef and 64,300 gallons of Portuguese wine.
On 18 November, she set sail for Englan.
In the ensuing days she defeated five British men-of-war and captured and scuttled a dozen English merchant ships, salvaging only the rum aboard each.
By 26 January, her powder and shot were exhausted. Nevertheless, although unarmed, she made a night raid up the Firth of Clyde in Scotland.
Her landing party captured a whisky distillery and transferred 40,000 gallons of single malt whisky aboard by dawn. Then she headed home.
The USS Constitution arrived in Boston on 20 February 1799, with no cannon shot, no food, no powder, no rum, no wine, no whisky, and 38,600 gallons of water.

Rico says that, given the quality of the water on board, drinking anything else was probably a hell of a good idea...

Do not an early adopter be

Rico says that, now that iFixit has stripped down the iPad, he thought he'd check in and see what they found:

Seems there's no space for a camera or any of the other 'gotta be there' things people have been talking about. But the price will come down, some features will doubtless be added, and Rico will be able to sell enough of his gubs to afford one.

E pur si muove! (And yet it moves)

Rico says that, when he woke up to the ladyfriend's radio this morning, NPR was talking about the Vatican observatory. At first he thought they were joking, or talking about L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, but no, there really is a Vatican observatory:

The Vatican Observatory is one of the oldest astronomical research institutions in the world. It has its headquarters at the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo, outside Rome, Italy. Its dependent research center, the Vatican Observatory Research Group, is hosted by Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona, Tucson, USA.
The Vatican Observatory Research Group operates the 1.8m Alice P. Lennon Telescope with its Thomas J. Bannan Astrophysics Facility, known together as the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT). This is located at the Mount Graham International Observatory (MGIO) in southeastern Arizona.

Why is the Vatican interested in astronomy? Initially it was for a practical reason, to reform the Julian Calendar, like so many national observatories that were started to improve navigation at sea; later at the establishment of the present form of the Vatican Observatory in 1891, for an apologetic purpose, in the sense of defending the Catholic Church's positive regard for science; now to join in doing good science in a way that is possible, given the Vatican's other concerns, as part of the consequence that the Incarnation of Christ applies to all human activity.

Rico says it's their translation; you'd think they could've done better. No mention, of course, of Galileo, who got into serious trouble for looking at the stars nearly three hundred years earlier...

History for the day

Just after 6 p.m. on 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers' strike, and was on his way to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead after his arrival at a Memphis hospital. He was 39 years old.
In the months before his assassination, Martin Luther King became increasingly concerned with the problem of economic inequality in America. He organized a Poor People's Campaign to focus on the issue, including an interracial poor people's march on Washington, and in March of 1968 traveled to Memphis in support of poorly treated African-American sanitation workers. On 28 March a workers' protest march led by King ended in violence and the death of an African-American teenager. King left the city but vowed to return in early April to lead another demonstration.
On 3 April, back in Memphis, King gave his last sermon, saying:

We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop... And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.

One day after speaking those words, Dr. King was shot and killed by a sniper. As word of the assassination spread, riots broke out in cities all across the United States ,and National Guard troops were deployed in Memphis and Washington, D.C. On 9 April, King was laid to rest in his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets to pay tribute to King's casket as it passed by in a wooden farm cart drawn by two mules.
The evening of King's murder, a Remington .30-06 hunting rifle was found on the sidewalk beside a rooming house one block from the Lorraine Motel. During the next several weeks, the rifle, eyewitness reports, and fingerprints on the weapon all implicated a single suspect: escaped convict James Earl Ray. A two-bit criminal, Ray escaped a Missouri prison in April of 1967 while serving a sentence for a holdup. In May of 1968, a massive manhunt for Ray began. The FBI eventually determined that he had obtained a Canadian passport under a false identity, which at the time was relatively easy.
On 8 June, Scotland Yard investigators arrested Ray at a London airport. He was trying to fly to Belgium, with the eventual goal, he later admitted, of reaching Rhodesia. Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe, was at the time ruled by an oppressive and internationally condemned white minority government. Extradited to the United States, Ray stood before a Memphis judge in March of 1969 and pleaded guilty to King's murder in order to avoid the electric chair. He was sentenced to 99 years in prison.
Three days later, he attempted to withdraw his guilty plea, claiming he was innocent of King's assassination and had been set up as a patsy in a larger conspiracy. He claimed that in 1967, a mysterious man named 'Raoul' had approached him and recruited him into a gunrunning enterprise. On 4 April 1968, he said, he realized that he was to be the fall guy for the King assassination and fled to Canada. Ray's motion was denied, as were his dozens of other requests for a trial during the next 29 years.
During the 1990s, the widow and children of Martin Luther King Jr. spoke publicly in support of Ray and his claims, calling him innocent and speculating about an assassination conspiracy involving the U.S. government and military. U.S. authorities were, in conspiracists' minds, implicated circumstantially. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover obsessed over King, who he thought was under communist influence. For the last six years of his life, King underwent constant wiretapping and harassment by the FBI. Before his death, Dr. King was also monitored by U.S. military intelligence, which may have been asked to watch King after he publicly denounced the Vietnam War in 1967. Furthermore, by calling for radical economic reforms in 1968, including guaranteed annual incomes for all, King was making few new friends in the Cold War-era U.S. government.
Over the years, the assassination has been reexamined by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the district attorney's office of Shelby County, Tennessee, and three times by the U.S. Justice Department. The investigations all ended with the same conclusion: James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King. The House committee acknowledged that a low-level conspiracy might have existed, involving one or more accomplices to Ray, but uncovered no evidence to definitively prove this theory. In addition to the mountain of evidence against him, such as his fingerprints on the murder weapon and his admitted presence at the rooming house on 4 April, Ray had a definite motive in assassinating King: hatred. According to his family and friends, he was an outspoken racist who informed them of his intent to kill Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He died in 1998.

Rico says it's one of the dubious privileges of getting older is remembering all this stuff first-hand. It was a scary time in the United States; one didn't know if there were massive government conspiracies or not but, coming less than five years after the Kennedy assassination, one would have believed anything...

Civil War for the day

Rico (at left) with the 1st NYVE gun crew at Fort Clinch in Jacksonville, Florida.

Politically incorrect, as usual

Rico's father sent an excited email entitled It finally arrived!:

Just wanted to let you know I received my government stimulus package yesterday. It contained two watermelon seeds, cornbread mix, and ten coupons to KFC. The directions were in Spanish.

Civil War for the day

Stone's River battlefield, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, taken in 2007.

WTF, indeed

The Anarchangel blog in Rico's sidebar always has interesting stuff, but this is definitely over the top. Rico says he wouldn't normally watch anything that Lady Gaga did, but this (while ludicrous) is hot... (Not safe for feminists to watch; you've been warned.)

Nun joke

Courtesy of my friend Kelley, this one:
An old nun, living in a convent next to a construction site, noticed the coarse language of the workers and decided to correct their ways. She thought she would take her lunch, sit with the workers, and talk with them. She put her sandwich in a brown bag and walked over to the spot where the men were eating. She walked up to the group and, with a big smile, said: "Do you men know Jesus Christ?"
They shook their heads and looked at each other very confused. One of the workers looked up into the steel and yelled out: "Anybody up there know Jesus Christ?"
One of the steelworkers yelled down: 'Why'?
The worker yelled back, "Because his wife's here with his fucking lunch, that's why."

A problem Rico should have

My friend Bill sends me this quandary: what do you do with eighty-nine billion (that's with a B) dollars for five hours?
Robert Frank has the story in The Wall Street Journal:
When Paul Fischer checked his account Friday night, he had a happy surprise. His bank balance was $88,888,888,888.88.  A very lucky number indeed, and close to $89 billion.
Of course, the balance was a technical error by SunTrust Bank, which quickly fixed the problem. It also may have occurred in other accounts. "You say, 'Eighty-eight billion, what can I do with that?'" said Mr. Fischer, who owns a jewelry concessionaire for Florida theme parks. "Maybe a handful of us could have brought down SunTrust Bank." Mr. Fischer had other ideas as well. Before the problem was fixed, he asked a SunTrust rep if he could move the money to an interest-bearing account until it was reclaimed and donate the interest to charity. Total interest: more than $7.3 million. The bank said no. The money was stripped out of his account by Saturday morning. "It's all gone. I'm poor again," he said. "I was a billionaire for five hours." This kind of bank error happens frequently. But Mr. Fischer raises an interesting question: What if, for five hours, you truly did have $89 billion? What would you do with the money? The ground rules are that you would have to give the money back, and whatever you bought or invested with it, after five hours.
Rico says fuck the ground rules, he'd have hit every ATM in town and max'd out his withdrawals, bought a Hummer and a lot of gubs, and been headed out of town very early on Saturday. It might've taken them a long time to find him, too...

Yet another one

Nicholas Kulish has an article in The New York Times about yet another paedophile priest in Germany:

The case that has raised questions about the future pope’s handling of a paedophile priest in Germany came to light three decades after it occurred, and then almost by chance. It happened when Wilfried Fesselmann, an early victim, said he stumbled on internet photographs of the priest who sexually abused him, still working with children. Mr. Fesselmann, who had long remained silent about the abuse he suffered in 1979, said the pictures stunned him and spurred him to contact his abuser. Thus began the convoluted process, which included an extortion investigation against Mr. Fesselmann for the emotionally raw email messages he sent the church in 2008 demanding compensation, that ultimately put Pope Benedict XVI in an uncomfortable spotlight.
After the police investigated him for blackmail, Mr. Fesselmann did not discuss his charges publicly until last month. By that time, molesting of children by other priests had exploded into public view in Germany, with scores of investigations into old and new cases capturing headlines nationwide.
The fact that it took so long before the Roman Catholic Church took action against the abusive priest, and that the victim initially had to defend himself, is an indication that the German church— as well as Germany’s police, courts, and society at large— are still in the early stages of reckoning on a psychologically fraught issue that many Germans once dismissed as an American problem.
Mr. Fesselmann also had no way of knowing that his case would create repercussions for the church that went well beyond his own grievance. His and other cases of abuse caused the church to transfer the abusive priest, the Reverend Peter Hullermann, to Munich in 1980, a decision that required the approval of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then the archbishop of Munich and Freising, now the pope. Father Hullermann was given therapy in Munich, but he was allowed to resume his pastoral duties almost immediately. Father Hullermann went on to molest other boys and was not formally suspended until last month, after the German church acknowledged that “bad mistakes” were made in the handling of his case. The church said the decision to allow the priest to resume his duties in 1980 was made solely by Cardinal Ratzinger’s top aide at the time, but church officials also said the future pope was sent a memo about the reassignment. While the church has acknowledged Father Hullermann’s extensive history of sexual abuse, there have been no court proceedings on Mr. Fesselmann’s claims.
Three decades after Mr. Fesselmann said Father Hullermann forced him, then eleven, to perform oral sex on him, he saw pictures of the priest— older and now heavy-set, but still recognizable— working with children in Bavaria, at the opposite end of the country.
Mr. Fesselmann sent intermittent email messages to Father Hullermann over the next year and a half. The messages were unsigned but sent from his personal account. In his messages he threatened to go public and asked about victims’ compensation. The email was answered, not by Father Hullermann, but by diocesan authorities in Munich, who asked Mr. Fesselmann to give them his full name so they could look into his charges.
He did not, but on the morning of 24 April 2008, while he was still corresponding with the archdiocese, six men appeared unannounced at his home in Essen: two police officers from Bavaria, two police officers from Essen, a city official and a representative of the church. “They said that they were there at 10 o’clock out of consideration, because my children were in school by then,” said Mr. Fesselmann, now 41, an unemployed father of three.
Prosecutors in Traunstein, the town in deeply Catholic Bavaria where Pope Benedict grew up, were investigating Mr. Fesselmann on charges of blackmail.
Church officials say that in this case they did exactly what they have been criticized so often for not doing: they referred the case to prosecutors rather than handling it internally. From there, it was prosecutors who chose to open the blackmail investigation.
“It is our duty to determine if there are criminal offenses, without pursuing them from any particular direction,” said Günther Hammerdinger, a spokesman for the Traunstein prosecutors office. “Since the possible sexual offenses were clearly past the statute of limitations, no investigative proceedings against the priest were started.”
Pressure on Mr. Fesselmann began long before he ever considered going public. He said that he was assaulted by other members of his church youth group, who blamed him for the suspension of Father Hullermann, a popular young chaplain, in 1979 and his later departure for Munich. Mr. Fesselmann’s devoutly religious parents were not among the three sets of parents who brought accusations to the priest in charge of St. Andreas Church at the time, charges Father Hullermann did not deny, according to the Essen Diocese.
“You weren’t supposed to say anything against the church,” Mr. Fesselmann said of his upbringing. On her deathbed in 2000, his mother asked him “to forget the whole thing and not to do anything about it,” Mr. Fesselmann said. He had told a friend about the abuse, whose parents then complained to the church.
Relatively few victims have come forward publicly in Germany to tell their stories of sexual abuse at the hands of priests, as Mr. Fesselmann did in the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung last month. Culturally, Germany is more reserved, and its people less demonstrative and emotionally open than in the United States. The atmosphere for victims of sexual abuse in Europe today is similar to what it was nearly a decade ago in the United States, where victims viewed themselves as isolated cases and did not see the point in coming forward, said Barbara Blaine, president of the advocacy group Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. “There doesn’t seem to be an environment where victims feel safe or free to speak up,” Ms. Blaine said.
Nor can victims in Germany expect the kind of million-dollar payouts that some American victims have received. Manuela Groll, a lawyer in Berlin representing fifteen students who say they were abused at Jesuit high schools in Germany, said that the highest civil judgment for a case of severe sexual abuse of a minor that she could find was less than $70,000 and a small monthly stipend.
Mr. Fesselmann, who as an adult had panic attacks that he said his therapist told him were a result of childhood trauma, said he wanted Father Hullermann to confess what he had done and stop working with children. A large man with a gentle manner, Mr. Fesselmann was no stranger to public attention. He has written two books on living well off the German welfare system, and appeared on television many times here. Mr. Fesselmann originally requested to have his full name kept out of media reports, and was cited only as Wilfried F. by The New York Times in a previous article. But his full name was published last month— against his wishes, he said— in Germany’s largest-circulation newspaper, the tabloid Bild.
After his initial email messages in 2006, a year and a half went by before he again emailed Father Hullermann and again received a response from a representative of the archdiocese handling child-abuse cases, Monsignor Siegfried Kneissl. In printed copies of email messages from April of 2008, provided by Mr. Fesselmann, Monsignor Kneissl encouraged him to come forward and allow church officials to check out his story. In his response, sent on 18 April, Mr. Fesselmann sounded angry and impatient, scolding Monsignor Kneissl for misspelling the name of the paedophile priest and writing that he had until 30 April to respond with “your offer with a financial allotment”. According to the prosecutor’s office in Traunstein, the investigation against Mr. Fesselmann had already begun, on 15 April 2008.
Criminal police officers from the nearby Bavarian town of Mühldorf visited Mr. Fesselmann on 24 April, the prosecutors office in Traunstein confirmed. Prosecutors also questioned Father Hullermann, but he was not investigated by the office at that time or since.
But the priest was re-evaluated by church officials. He was relieved of his duties in the town of Garching an der Alz on 6 May 2008, and later sent to work in the spa town of Bad Tölz, on the condition that he no longer work with children. Father Hullermann was suspended last month, three days after his case became public, after the news media reported that he was still working with children in his new position. Last week, new accusations of sexual abuse emerged, both from his first assignment near Essen in the 1970s and from 1998 in Garching.
Three weeks after the police visited his home, Mr. Fesselmann received a letter in the mail from prosecutors, saying that the investigation had been dropped as of 14 May 2008. “The defense of the accused cannot be disproved, that he had no intention to ask for money or to be compensated, but that instead he intended to get proof of the incidents between him and the witness Hullermann,” the letter said.

Can't criticize the Pope? What fun is that?

Daniel Wakin has an article in The New York Times about more defense by the European bishops:

Several prominent European churchmen on Thursday denounced suggestions that Pope Benedict XVI was anything but a vigorous defender of victims of priestly sexual abuse, arguing that the pope should not be criticized for his oversight of such cases. “Deceitful accusations have been leveled against he who has done, and does, so much to remove ‘every filth’” from the priesthood, Cardinal Angelo Scola, the patriarch of Venice, said at a Mass there. Cardinal Scola, a major figure in the Italian church, repeated the pope’s words that paedophilia was “an odious crime but also a scandalously grave sin”.
The comments came as the Roman Catholic Church gears up for Easter Sunday, the holiest day on the Christian calendar, and were made on Holy Thursday, a day dedicated to the reaffirmation of priestly vows and to the bond between a bishop and his priests. The comments emerged after weeks of extensive reporting on sexual abuse in the church by the news media and increasing anger among many European Catholics about bishops’ handling of abuse cases.
The pope celebrated a Mass in the morning for his priests and bishops in St. Peter’s Basilica and an evening Mass at St. John Lateran in Rome, where he carried out the tradition of washing the feet of a dozen priests. Benedict did not refer to the scandal in his homilies.
Speculation has circulated that the pope may do so on Good Friday, when he takes part in the Way of the Cross ceremonies at the Colosseum, observing Jesus’s final hours and his crucifixion. Shortly before Benedict became pope in 2005, he used meditations he wrote for the Way of the Cross services to denounce “filth” in the church.
On Wednesday, Cardinal William J. Levada, an American who leads the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, provided a lengthy defense of Benedict’s record on handling abuse cases in an interview with The New York Times and a statement posted on the Vatican website. He singled out The Times for what he called unfair coverage, addressing specifically a report about a Wisconsin priest who abused up to 200 deaf boys from 1950 to 1974. The pope has also come under scrutiny for his actions as archbishop of Munich and Freising when a paedophile priest there was transferred back into ministry in 1980.
On Thursday, other cardinals joined the fray. The archbishop of Warsaw, Kazimierz Nycz, faulted news organizations for “targeting the whole church, targeting the pope”. The Associated Press reported. “To that we must say no in the name of truth and in the name of justice,” Archbishop Nycz said.
Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the leader of the Austrian church, told reporters on Thursday, “I can say with certainty that, in his role as chief of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he had a very clear line of not covering up, but clearing up.”
Reports of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, after a rampant scandal in 2002 and 2003 in the United States, have gathered a storm in Europe in recent months. Cases have emerged in bulk in the pope’s native Germany and in Ireland, and to some extent in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Austria.
While suggestions that the pope should assume any responsibility for the scandals has prompted angry reaction from prelates, at the same time bishops have been speaking up to denounce the transgressions of some of their priests. They are following the lead of Benedict, who expressed “shame and remorse” and partly blamed bishops in a letter issued last month that was directed at the church in Ireland, where the scandal has been most widespread in Europe.
The chairwoman of We Are Church, a movement of Catholics seeking changes in church policy, said some of the European bishops seemed sincere, while “maybe other ones” wanted just to appease those protesting the abuse. “At least it’s important that they are reacting and pretending not to hide,” said the official, Raquel Mallavibarrena, in Madrid.
Elsewhere, the Swiss bishops conference issued a statement recognizing that it had “undervalued the breadth of the phenomenon”. It said leaders of dioceses and religious orders had made “errors,” and asked for pardon. The Swiss bishops also encouraged victims to report abuse to the authorities.

Rico says 'undervalued the breadth of the phenomenon'? That's a good one, like saying 'hey, who knew there were all those starving people in Africa?' They should be ashamed of themselves, but what would be the point?

Letting them out

Nina Bernstein has an article in The New York Times about Haitian immigration, legal and otherwise:

More than three dozen Haitian earthquake survivors were released from Florida immigration jails on Thursday after more than two months in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Many had lost relatives in the 12 January earthquake; some had been pulled from the rubble themselves. In the chaotic days and aftershocks that followed, many had been seeking security, food, or treatment at the Port-au-Prince airport when they were waved onto military transports or other planes by United States Marines, only to be detained for lack of visas when they landed.
Lawyers at the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, who had urged their release for weeks, were jubilant as they waited with relatives outside the Broward County Transitional Center, a privately operated jail in Pompano Beach, for the last ones to walk out. Immigration officials said forty Haitian survivors would be released on orders of supervision by nightfall. This came on the day that The New York Times reported that at least thirty earthquake survivors were being detained.
By February, nearly all had been ordered deported, but deportations have been indefinitely suspended since the earthquake. Advocates said their continued detention was traumatic and legally unjustified. Allison Kent, a lawyer with the center, said two young women remained in jail, including one originally flown to the United States for hospital care, because they were still in deportation proceedings. A Creole-speaking therapist was to visit them Friday, she said.
Lawyers said the federal government was now reversing a practice adopted after the earthquake, to hold Haitians for at least ninety days after a deportation order before considering them for supervised release. Those released can be returned to Haiti when deportations resume.
Among the first to be freed was Jackson Ulysse, 20, whose request for release described how sounds in the jail made him fear another earthquake and panic that he would not be able to get out. He had been trapped when his family’s apartment building collapsed in the quake, in which many relatives died. He and his brother, Reagan Ulysse, 25, had been detained together until 11 March, when Reagan was abruptly transferred to a distant immigration jail, leaving Jackson not knowing where he was. But by Thursday evening a family friend had picked up Jackson and was driving him to pick up Reagan from the lobby of the Krome Detention Center in Miami.
“That’s what I want: to see my brother, to see that they let him go, I want to hug him,” Jackson said in French in a telephone interview. “I’m very happy, and I’m going to church to thank God.”
The brothers’ uncle, Virgile Ulysse, 69, a United States citizen who will take them in to his home in Norwalk, Connecticut, was also full of gratitude. (That's him in the photo.) “Thank the United States for Jackson and Reagan’s release,” he said in a telephone message.

No iPad sales in Lithuania, apparently

Landon Thomas has an article in The New York Times about problems in Lithuania:

If leaders of the world’s many indebted countries want to see what austerity looks like, they might want to visit this Baltic nation of 3.3 million. Faced with rising deficits that threatened to bankrupt the country, Lithuania cut public spending by thirty percent, including slashing public sector wages twenty to thirty percent and reducing pensions by as much as eleven percent. Even the prime minister, Andrius Kubilius, took a pay cut of 45 percent. And the government didn’t stop there. It raised taxes on a wide variety of goods, like pharmaceutical products and alcohol. Corporate taxes rose to twenty percent, from fifteen percent. The value-added tax rose to 21 percent, from eighteen percent.
The net effect on this country’s finances was a savings equal to nine percent of gross domestic product, the second-largest fiscal adjustment in a developed economy, after Latvia’s, since the credit crisis began. But austerity has exacted its own price, in social and personal pain. Pensioners, their benefits cut, swamped soup kitchens. Unemployment jumped to a high of fourteen percent from single digits, and an already wobbly economy shrank fifteen percent last year. Remarkably, for the most part, the austerity was imposed with the grudging support of Lithuania’s trade unions and opposition parties, and has yet to elicit the kind of protest expressed by the regular, widespread street demonstrations and strikes seen in Greece, Spain, and Britain.
To be sure, Mr. Kubilius has many critics here and abroad. Government austerity in the midst of a recession runs counter to the Keynesian approach of increasing public expenditures to fight a downturn. That was the path most countries chose. But Mr. Kubilius and his team say that, with a budget deficit of nine percent of GDP, a currency fixed to the euro and international bond markets unwilling to lend to Lithuania, the government had no choice but to show the world it could impose its own internal devaluation by cutting public spending, restoring competitiveness and reclaiming the good will of the bond markets. Another motivation was to conform to the rules of membership for the euro currency union, which Lithuania hopes to join by 2014.
Indeed, outside of Ireland, no country in Europe has come close to replicating Lithuania’s severe spending cuts without the aid of the International Monetary Fund. Ireland passed the most austere budget in the country’s history, and public sector pay cuts were a centerpiece of the government’s reform effort. The Finance Ministry has forecast growth of 1.5 percent this year, and this week Moody’s increased its outlook on the Lithuanian economy to stable, from negative. “From a credit rating perspective, Lithuania has put itself on positive trajectory,” said Kenneth Orchard, a senior credit officer in Moody’s sovereign risk group.
As European nations consider what the social and political costs will be when they take steps to cut public sector spending, Lithuania offers a real-time case study of the societal trade-offs.
Speed and communication are the most crucial to success, Mr. Kubilius said in an interview in his office last week. “You have to have a dialogue with your social partners, and you have to do the most difficult cuts as quickly as possible,” he said. “I told them this is history. You need to decide now how you want to be described in our history books.”
Like Latvia and Estonia, Lithuania rode a boom driven by banking and real estate earlier this decade. Construction came to dominate the economy, and low interest rates spurred a housing boom. Many Lithuanians took out low-interest-rate mortgages denominated in foreign currencies.
With the onset of the crisis, house prices plunged, building ground to a halt and, quite suddenly, thousands lost their jobs and began to default on their debts.
While the quaint cobblestone streets of Vilnius may project an air of prosperity, one does not need to travel far to witness the pain many Lithuanians are feeling. Monika Midveryte, a university student, and her mother are now supporting the family after her father lost his construction job. Now, she said, he sits at home in front of the television drinking his troubles away. “He has no hope.”
The psychological toll has been immense. Suicides have increased in a country where the suicide rate of 35 per 100,000 is already one of the world’s highest, local experts say. According to figures collected by the Youth Psychological Aid Center, telephone calls to its hot line from people who said they were on the verge of committing suicide nearly doubled last year to 1,400, from 750.
As the president of Solidarumas, one of Lithuania’s largest trade unions, Aldona Jasinskiene has an acute understanding of how bad things are; not just as the head of her union, but as a mother. For more than a year, her salary has paid the 2,300 litas, about $900, in monthly mortgage payments for her forty-year-old son, who lost his construction job. Ms. Jasinskiene says his mental health is suffering, he is fighting with his wife and his family of four dines on potatoes three times a day. Now, with her own pension having been slashed, she is left with just 300 litas a month to support herself and her fifteen-year-old granddaughter. Ms. Jasinskiene said she signed the agreement with the government because unions, which are extremely weak in Lithuania, were not capable of calling the type of general strike well known in other parts of Europe, and because she wanted to do what she could to prevent even deeper cuts. While Mr. Kubilius points to positive signs like renewed growth, busy cafes in Vilnius, and upgrades by the credit agencies, from her vantage point, Ms. Jasinskiene sees no upturn. “He is telling you a fairy tale,” she said. “Unemployment is going up and up.”
Algirdas Malakauskis, a priest at St. Francis and St. Bernardine Friary, has also experienced the recession’s toll firsthand. He has had to preside over an increasing number of funerals for people who have taken their own lives. Parishioners now come to him seeking work, and his elderly parents, whose pensions have been cut, are angry. Like a surprising number of people here, however, he has not turned on the government. “You can see they are doing everything that they can to keep the situation stable,” he said.
Still, the tough measures have drawn criticism outside Lithuania. “The internal devaluation strategy may have succeeded in delivering short-term stabilization, but at what cost?” asked Charles Woolfson, a professor of labor studies at the University of Glasgow who has expertise in the Baltics.
Professor Woolfson points out that deepening social alienation in Lithuania has resulted in the sharpest rise in emigration since the country joined the European Union in 2004. “Then it was the migration of the hopeful,” he said. “Now it is the migration of the despairing.”
There is no greater totem to the excesses of the lending frenzy that gave Lithuania one of the highest growth rates in Europe in 2007 than the sparkling Swedbank office building. Completed just last year, it is sixteen stories high and monopolizes the modest Vilnius skyline. Swedbank is the dominant bank in Lithuania, and its aggressive lending to first-time home buyers, including Ms. Jasinskiene’s son, continues to be a millstone for many here. “People are angry,” said Odeta Bloziene, who runs a unit within the bank that gives advice to Lithuanians who are having trouble repaying their loans. “But we never run away from our customers.” In the reception area of the bank’s headquarters, bankers laughed and drank beer from a well-stocked bar as rock music played in the background. It is a far remove from the soup kitchen at St. Peter and St. Paul’s Church in Vilnius, where 500 people a day line up for a free meal of soup and Lithuanian pancakes.
Mecislovas Zukauskas, 88, a retired electrician, has lived through the devastations of World War Two, the Soviet occupation and, most recently, the death of his wife. He is taking his pension cut in stride. “The government does what it wants to do,” he said. “We can do nothing.”

More iPad dissent

Brad Stone and Claire Miller have an article in The New York Times about nay-sayers and the iPad:

If the much-promoted iPad is going to be a mainstream consumer hit, Apple is going to have to change the minds of people like Jon Byron. Mr. Byron, a 54-year-old banker from Connecticut, emerged from the Apple store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan this week with a new business card scanner and serious doubts about the tablet computer trend. “I can do everything on my MacBook Pro, cellphone, and BlackBerry,” Mr. Byron said. “I don’t need any more devices. I already have six phone numbers and enough things to plug in at night.” For all the exuberance surrounding Apple’s new gadget, and the circuslike atmosphere at Apple stores that is sure to accompany its debut on Saturday, sentiments like that are, for Apple at least, uncomfortably common.
Many consumers do not understand the device’s purpose, who would want to pay $500 or more for it and why anyone would need another gadget on top of a computer and smartphone. After all, phones are performing an ever-expanding range of functions, as Apple points out in its many iPhone commercials.
“The first five million will be sold in a heartbeat,” said Guy Kawasaki, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who was a marketing executive at Apple in the 1980s. “But let’s see: you can’t make a phone call with it, you can’t take a picture with it, and you have to buy content that before now you were not willing to pay for. That seems tough to me.”
Apple and other technology companies that are introducing a wave of touch-screen tablets face an ambitious challenge. The industry wants to create a market for a new type of device that most people do not really need, or do not yet know they need. Tablets are intended to allow people to watch video, browse the Web, play video games and read books, magazines and newspapers everywhere they go without the bulky inconveniences of a full-fledged laptop.
The people who have already ordered an iPad or will show up at the Apple store on Saturday “are technophiles; the phrase ‘leading-edge technology’ sends goosebumps all over their skin,” said Eitan Muller, a professor of high-tech marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business. But those people make up only sixteen percent of the total potential market for the iPad, Professor Muller said. “The main market is made up of pragmatists, and the same phrase sends them into convulsions.”
Technology research firms are trying to measure this skepticism ahead of the iPad’s introduction. One firm, NPD, found in a study that 18 percent of consumers expressed interest in owning an iPad. Interviews with a range of people over the last week underscored this uncertainty. There was a subtle sense of frustration among some consumers that they were being asked to bring yet another expensive device into lives already cluttered with finger-smudged screens and tangled power cords.
“I just want to know, what is this supposed to be used for?” said Ebony White, 21, a child care worker in San Francisco who has discussed the iPad with her friends, all of whom have decided to pass. “If I was going to spend that much money to buy something, it would just be a computer, because it costs just as much and it can do more things.” She added: “Where am I supposed to use it? Am I supposed to use it on the bus and get robbed?”
John Morgan, 48, who was visiting New York from Rockville, Maryland with his family last week, has already pledged his devotion to Steve Jobs & Company. “We’re a six-iPod family,” he said. But he vowed they would remain a zero-iPad family: “It’s too expensive.” His son Alex, 9, added that the family already had an iPod Touch, “so it’s not like we need one.”
Karla Villarreal, 28, an entertainment and business promoter from Queens, is also an unabashed Apple fan, and dug through her bag for her iPod Nano, iPod Touch, and BlackBerry on the New York subway this week. But those devices, she said, leave little room in her technology budget, or her purse, for a new tablet computer. “It’s going to be really hard, especially during this recession. So, no more devices for me,” she said.
It may be too early to gauge consumer interest in the iPad. Developers have not yet had time to prepare a variety of applications for the device, and Apple has not yet done much of what it perhaps does best: advertise.
Gene Munster, an analyst with Piper Jaffray, estimates that Apple will spend $515 million on advertising this year and devote $77 million of that, or fifteen percent, to promoting the iPad. If its commercial that first appeared during the Academy Awards broadcast is any guide, those ads will not highlight any one aspect of the device, but will aim to convey a general feeling of exciting possibility.
“Apple will position this like they positioned the iPhone: as a fun entertainment machine,” said Don Norman, a professor at Northwestern University who has predicted the proliferation of multiple screens and devices. “Their ads will make people feel like using the machine, even if what they’re doing with it is beside the point.”
In some respects, time is on Apple’s side. The price of the iPad will inevitably come down, and developers will produce inventive applications for the device, creating new uses for it as they did for the iPhone.
The Apple acolytes will perform much of Apple’s hardest work for it: toting the iPad into subways and stores, where its presence could have the same head-turning impact that the iPod, with its white ear buds, delivered eight years ago. “It’s a want, as opposed to a need,” said one of those Apple fans, Ryan Kenney, 29, describing his nascent desire for the iPad in New York this week. “You don’t really need it. Between a smartphone and a laptop, that covers all the bases. But I’d wear their underwear if they made it.”

Rico says that's okay, he'l have the one they don't want...

iPad, stripped naked

Reuters has an article about field-stripping the iPad:

The iPad will not hit stores until Saturday, but the race to unlock its mysteries started several weeks ago in San Luis Obispo, a picturesque college town roughly 200 miles south of Apple's Silicon Valley headquarters. On 12 March, Kyle Wiens and Luke Soules woke up before dawn. Their plan demanded that they be among the first to get their hands on the device. So, at 5:30 a.m., the minute Apple began taking iPad orders on its website, Wiens and Soules, do-it-yourself repair evangelists and co-founders of a company called iFixit, placed theirs. As delivery addresses, they entered several U.S. locations where their research determined the iPad is likely to arrive soonest. They could tell you which ones, but then they would have to kill you.
Armed with heat guns, suction cups, and other tools of the trade, the duo will set out on Saturday to reveal some of the tablet's most closely guarded secrets: the design and components that make it tick. If all goes according to plan, by the time the lines outside Apple Stores start to thin, iFixit will have provided a blow-by-blow account of its "teardown" to the world, complete with a photo montage.
Such details are manna for the Apple faithful, and iFixit has made a name for itself in technology circles by providing them fast. To do so, Wiens and Soules must above all make sure they are among the very first people to be in actual possession of these hotly anticipated gadgets. And this being Apple, one of the world's most secretive companies, each launch presents a different set of challenges.
Apple's mostly unsung suppliers, which are barred from talking about their most famous customer, will admit in private that they love these teardowns by iFixit and others. The spectacles trumpet to the world that a manufacturer is good enough to make it into an Apple product. In late 2006, the mere rumor that a component by Skyworks Solutions would be in the original iPhone was enough to boost its share price.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Apple, which declined to comment for this story, does not like anybody monkeying around with its devices. This, after all, is a company that won't even let users change their iPod and iPhone batteries. It has fired executives over leaks and sued bloggers to halt their revelations.
But there is nothing Apple can do about teardowns. "What we do is completely legal, but if they could stop us they would," Wiens, 26, said with a touch of pride. He said that iFixit has had no formal contact with Apple.
What Apple can and does do is make its devices tougher for him and others to decrypt. Teardown firms say the electronics giant forces some suppliers to stamp their microprocessors with the Apple logo, making it harder to determine their provenance.
"Apple is usually trying to cloak who its suppliers are," said David Carey of UBM TechInsights, a prominent teardown firm. "But it can only keep the door closed for so long."
One reason Apple frowns upon teardowns, say experts, is that it is reluctant to broadcast that it doesn't manufacture the widgets itself. "Apple really wants end users to think that Apple makes this thing, that Apple makes the iPad, not Foxconn, Samsung, Toshiba," Soules said.
For iFixit, these techno-stripteases are more than just publicity stunts designed to promote its business (though they are that for sure). They are also, to hear Wiens and Soules tell it, a cause. The two businessmen say one of their goals is to cut down on electronic waste that ends up in landfills by demonstrating the old-fashioned virtue of repair, extending the lifespan of devices. Wiens said it was his mission to make repair "sexy". He refers to Apple as a "closed company", because it doesn't want its users repairing its products. "We used to fix things in this country, back in the 1950s it was cool to tinker with your car, but that changed as it became more of a consumer culture," he said.
Wiens and Soules launched iFixit, which sells Apple parts and provides free online repair manuals, as teenagers in 2003 out of their college dorm at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo. It is now a thriving small business that employs around two dozen people and generates more than $2 million in annual sales. With so much riding on getting hold of the iPad first, or close to it, iFixit is playing the odds, flying representatives to multiple cities that Wiens and Soules are keeping to themselves for the moment.
If past is prologue, there is little they won't do to be among the first. In 2008, the year Apple debuted the second-generation iPhone in a global launch, Soules chased it 6,000 miles to the first time zone where he could find the device. He flew to Auckland, New Zealand, and headed to a Vodafone store. There, he waited on line for more than a full day. By his count, he was the fourth person in the world to get the iPhone. There was just one problem. Soules, a soft-spoken, baby-faced 25-year-old who could easily pass for 16, didn't know a soul in Auckland. So iFixit combed its client list and found one helpful fellow who offered up his print shop to host the teardown. It began shortly after midnight and lasted all night, with Soules streaming nearly live photos onto the Internet to waiting Apple fans half a world away.
Last year was even tougher. Wiens traveled to Britain to get ahead of the third-generation iPhone launch. But his scheme was foiled, he said, when a carrier store in France began selling the device at midnight. He was not among the first to get it, a failure that still rankles. "There's no magic formula to this, we make up a new plan with each launch, and sometimes it doesn't work out."
The iPad is Apple's most high-profile product launch since the iPhone three years ago. Starting at $499, the 9.7-inch iPad represents a new category of device, an always-on, all-purpose tool for media consumption. Stores are sure to be packed on launch day, but Wall Street is still debating its long-term impact on Apple's bottom line. Many analysts expect the company to sell 4 million to 5 million iPads this year.
Whether the iPad flops or becomes the next big thing, the competition to accurately divulge who made which microprocessor and sundry other parts will be fierce. "There are a lot of people doing this now," said Carey of UBM TechInsights. But he said all teardowns are not created equal. "There are different levels of audience and sophistication, and we have tools and lab capabilities that let us drill down to the transistor level." Indeed, TechInsights' report on the iPhone 3G provides a level of detail only engineers could love, describing the pin counts on diode arrays that measure a millimeter in length and cost 3 cents.
In contrast to iFixit, which makes public its teardown information, TechInsights provides its data to paying clients. Its reports can run 200 pages. While speed is important, Carey said, it is not the main concern. Teardown firms like his are hired by an array of clients throughout the technology foodchain. The data is used for competitive intelligence, in patent disputes, or by those simply looking to stay current on industry benchmarks. Stripping down a device can last a week or more, requiring a variety of tools. Just opening an Apple gizmo can be tricky; the first generation iPhone, in particular, was sealed up tight enough to frustrate Harry Houdini. "Apple thinks of the iPhone as a magical black box," said Wiens. "They hate screws."
Besides heat guns for melting seals, suction cups for maneuvering screens, and a small hooked stick called a spudger, some less conventional instruments sometimes come into play. "It turned out the best tool to take apart the original iPhone was a dental pick," Wiens said.
Identifying certain computer chips takes some digital sleuthing. The web is awash in lists of component serial numbers, so parts often can be tied to the manufacturer simply by plugging them into a search engine such as Google. But divining the origin of other parts requires more expensive hardware, such as X-ray machines or a scanning electron microscope, a desk-sized device that provides pictures at the nanometer level. Chips are carefully sliced open, and then examined from the inside, a process that can take days.
Francis Sideco, an analyst with research group iSuppli, calls the process of identifying parts "doing triangulation". He said iSuppli expects to put out an iPad teardown analysis a few days after the launch. "We like to get it right, we don't want to wait two weeks, but we do want to get it right," Sideco said.
There is only one iPad component that is known for certain: Apple has already announced that its very own A4 processor is the primary brains of the device. The chip is reportedly manufactured for Apple by Samsung. ISuppli predicts that other chip suppliers will include Broadcom Corp and Texas Instruments Inc. Flash memory could come from Samsung and Toshiba Corp.
The iPad display and touchscreen are the most expensive part of the device, likely to be around $80. They are also the biggest engineering mystery, Sideco said. The iPad's screen measures 9.7-inches. "Capacitive touchscreens are typically 3-to-4 inches, and increasing sizes is one of the biggest challenges. The display is key, and what it costs," he said.
In the past, iFixit's teardowns have turned up parts from companies like Wolfson Microelectronics Plc, Skyworks Solutions Inc, TriQuint Semiconductor Inc., and Marvell Technology Group Ltd.
The team also discovered a small space in the iPod touch meant for a camera, although the device doesn't yet include one. They don't know what they'll find when they crack open the iPad, but they certainly plan to be among the first.
Wiens and Soules own homes next door to each other in Atascadero, a 15-minute drive north from San Luis Obispo. Soules' house doubles as an office for around ten employees, as well as an Apple parts depot. The house is an Apple geek wonderland, with a cat named Midnight prowling the halls. The decor is dominated by a life-sized suit of armor, and racks filled with parts for iPods, iPhones, and Mac computers. A jacuzzi-style tub in the bathroom doesn't appear to have been used in some time, as it is piled high with boxes.
Soules just shrugs when asked about the clutter, but he seems right at home. He got his first Mac when he was in first grade, and worked as a computer tech through high school. His grandfather fixed typewriters, so repair is in his blood.
Wiens' father ran a Harley-Davidson dealership, and he said Apple's cult appeal has a lot in common with that of the motorcycle maker. "Mystery attracts attention, and Apple is a master at getting attention," he said.